Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In these terms the political struggle in the United States has shifted in two ways, or even three. This struggle, in the minds of the ill-informed, had always been viewed as a struggle between Republicans and Democrats at the ballot box in November. Wall Street, long ago, however, had seen that the real struggle was in the nominating conventions the preceding summer. This realization was forced upon the petty-bourgeois supporters of Republican candidates by their antipathy for Willkie, Dewey, Eisenhower, and other Wall Street interventionists and their inability to nominate their congressional favorites, like Senators Knowland, Bricker, and Taft, at national party conventions. Just as these disgruntled voters reached this conclusion, with Taft’s failure in 1952, the new wealth appeared in the political picture, sharing the petty bourgeoisie’s suspicions of the East, big cities, Ivy League universities, foreigners, intellectuals, workers, and aristocrats. By the 1964 election, the major political issue in the country was the financial struggle behind the scenes between the old wealth, civilized and cultured in foundations, and the new wealth, virile and uninformed, arising from the flowing profits of government-dependent corporations in the Southwest and West.

At issue here was the whole future face of America, for the older wealth stood for values and aims close to the Western traditions of diversity, tolerance, human rights and values, freedom, and the rest of it, while the newer wealth stood for the narrow and fear-racked aims of petty-bourgeois insecurity and egocentricity. The nominal issues between them, such as that between internationalism and unilateral isolationism (which its supporters preferred to rename “nationalism”), were less fundamental than they seemed, for the real issue was the control of the Federal government’s tremendous power to influence the future of America by spending of government funds. The petty bourgeois and new-wealth groups wanted to continue that spending into the industrial-military complex, such as defense and space, while the older wealth and nonbourgeois groups wanted to direct it toward social diversity and social amelioration for the aged and the young, for education, for social outcasts, and for protecting national resources for future use.

The outcome of this struggle, which still goes on, is one in which civilized people can afford to be optimistic. For the newer wealth is unbelievably ignorant and misinformed. In their growing concern to control political nominations, they ignored the even greater need to win elections. They did not realize that the disintegration of the middle classes, chiefly from the abandonment of the middle-class outlook, was creating an American electorate that would never elect any candidate the newer wealth would care to nominate. As part of this lack of vision, the new wealth and its petty-bourgeois supporters ignored the well-established principle that a national candidate must have a national appeal and that this is obtained best by a candidate close to the center.

In American politics we have several parties included under the blanket words “Democratic” and “Republican.” In oversimplified terms, as I have said, the Republicans were the party of the middle classes, and the Democrats were the party of the fringes. Both of these were subdivided, each with a Congressional and a National Party wing. The Republican Congressional Party (representing localism) was much farther to the Right than the National Republican Party, and as such was closer to the petty-bourgeois than to the upper-middle-class outlook. The Democratic Congressional Party was much more clearly of the fringes and minorities (and thus often further to the Left) than the Democratic National Party. The party machinery in each case was in Congressional Party control during the intervals between the quadrennial presidential elections, but, in order to win these elections, each had to call into existence, in presidential election years, its shadowy National Party. This meant that the Republicans had to appear to move to the Left, closer to the Center, while the Democrats had also to move from the fringes toward the Center, usually by moving to the Right. As a result, the National parties and their presidential candidates, with the Eastern Establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the scenes, moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost identical candidates and platforms, although the process was concealed, as much as possible, by the revival of obsolescent or meaningless war cries and slogans (often going back to the Civil War). As soon as the presidential election was over, the two National parties vanished, and party controls fell back into the hands of the Congressional parties, leaving the newly elected President in a precarious position between the two Congressional parties, neither of which was very close to the brief National coalition that had elected him.

The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method: we must remain strong, continue to function as a great world Power in cooperation with other Powers, avoid high-level war, keep the economy moving without significant slump, help other countries do the same, provide the basic social necessities tor all our citizens, open up opportunities for social shifts for those willing to work to achieve them, and defend the basic Western outlook of diversity, pluralism, cooperation, and the rest of it, as already described. These things any national American party hoping to win a presidential election must accept. But either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.

The capture of the Republican National Party by the extremist elements of the Republican Congressional Party in 1964, and their effort to elect Barry Goldwater to the Presidency with the petty-bourgeois extremists alone, was only a temporary aberration on the American political scene, and arose from the fact that President Johnson had preempted all the issues (which are, as we have said, now acceptable to the overwhelming majority) and had occupied the whole broad center of the American political spectrum, so that it was hardly worth while for the Republicans to run a real contestant against him in the same area. Thus Goldwater was able to take control of the Republican National Party by default.

The virulence behind the Goldwater campaign, however, had nothing to do with default or lack of intensity. Quite the contrary. His most ardent supporters were of the extremist petty-bourgeois mentality driven to near hysteria by the disintegration of the middle classes and the steady rise in prominence of everything they considered anathema: Catholics, Negroes, immigrants, intellectuals, aristocrats (and near aristocrats), scientists, and educated men generally, people from big cities or from the East, cosmopolitans and internationalists and, above all, liberals who accept diversity as a virtue.

This disintegration of the middle classes had a variety of causes, some of them intrinsic, many of them accidental, a few of them obvious, but many of them going deeply into the very depths of social existence.